Intel kicked off its 2016 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich delivered his keynote which covered Intel’s push for a Connected World with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Krzanich talked about Merged Reality which is a new way of experiencing physical and virtual interactions and environments through a suite of n

ext-generation sensing and digitizing technologies. Merged Reality seems to be the next step after Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. According to Krzanich,

“Merged reality delivers virtual world experiences more dynamically and naturally than ever before – and makes experiences impossible in the real world now possible.”

Intel wants to be present everywhere in a connected world – in products that are designed for virtual reality, autonomous driving and the industrial Internet. Krzanich mentioned on Medium :

Pick up your real-world tennis racket in your living room and step virtually onto the court at Wimbledon. In doing so, forgo the cost — and creep factor — of installing high-end sensors in every corner of your living room normally needed to scan your environment. Instead just lean fully into practicing your back swing — bringing both your hand and your racket into the virtual field of play. Surge backward or forward, reach up or down, sway to the left or right — enjoy fully 6 degrees of total freedom in your movement. And take that virtual swing, without hitting that very real-world, and very expensive, table lamp several feet away from you.

This sounds a lot like the phenomenon we are seeing with Pokemon Go. As gaming devices and products such as Microsoft Hololens evolve, we will see more of the merging of real and virtual world. Consistent with Krzanich’s keynote, Intel unveiled Project Alloy, an all-in-one virtual reality solution that features the compute and sensors integrated directly into the headset and leverages Intel RealSense technology.

Project Alloy will be offered as an open hardware platform in 2017. Project Alloy will offer small system builders an opportunity to add a completely new product to their range of laptops and desktops.

Intel also announced a collaborative effort with Microsoft on developing a specification for mixed reality ready PCs and head mounted displays (HMDs). Intel and Microsoft want to enable hardware partners to build a broad range of devices for the mainstream consumer and business markets. In 2017, Microsoft will be releasing an update to Windows 10, which will enable mainstream PCs to run the Windows Holographic shell for Merged Reality.

Also besides Intel Euclid Developer Kit for developers to create applications easily for Realsense based devices, Intel also introduced a new Intel Joule platform for the Internet of Things. The Intel Joule platform is a high performance system-on-module (SOM) in a tiny, low-power package thus making it ideal for computer vision, robotics, drones, industrial IoT, VR, AR, micro-servers and other applications that require high-end edge computing. This may also help in the development of new wearable devices for athletic sports as seen in 2016 RIO Olympics. VR devices and wearables are already being used to improve performance.

In a big milestone, Intel announced a partnership with ARM to try and gain share in the smartphone market. The ARM Artisan chip can be used for power-efficient, high-performance implementations for mobile, IoT and other consumer applications.

Overall, good set of announcements from Intel. We will see partner announcements over the next couple days. Samsung, Dell, , Ericsson, GE Digital, IBM Cloud, Inspur, Supermicro, Lenovo, Microsoft and Nokia are Gold sponsors and they along with other exhibitors will feature and announce their new IoT and enterprise servers, storage and other Intel powered devices.

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